Reality Hunger (28 page)

hip-hop

Genius borrows nobly.

Good poets borrow; great poets steal.

Art is theft.

Why is hip-hop stagnant right now, why is rock dead, why is the conventional novel moribund? Because they’re ignoring the culture around them, where new, more exciting forms of narration and presentation and representation are being found (or rediscovered).

American R & B was enormously popular in Jamaica in the 1950s, but none of the local musicians could play it authentically.
The music culture was based around DJs playing records at public dances; huge public-address systems were set up for these dances. DJs started acting more and more as taste editors, gaining reputations for the distinct type of record each of them would play. After a while, the act of playing the records also became an opportunity for style and artistic expression. They still used only one record player, but they developed special techniques of switching records in a split second to keep the music going seamlessly. The Jamaican music industry started producing its own recordings, and they, too, were utilized by these sound-system men, who would make recordings specifically for their own dances and wouldn’t let anyone else have the record. Even when Jamaican musicians were available to play these public dances, the audience preferred the manipulation and combination of prerecorded material.

Sampling, the technique of taking a section of existing, recorded sound and placing it within an “original” composition, is a new way of doing something that’s been done for a long time: creating with found objects. The rotation gets thick. The constraints get thin. The mix breaks free of the old associations. New contexts form from old. The script gets flipped.

In the 1960s, dub reggae—artists recording new parts over preexisting music, often adding new vocals and heavy tape echo—evolved straight out of the sound-system DJ movement, which was always eager to incorporate any new advancement in technology. A decade later, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry began deconstructing recorded music. Using
extremely primitive, predigital hardware, they created what they called versions. In 1962, Jamaica was granted its full independence from Britain, and more Jamaicans started coming to the United States. It was only natural that these immigrants would gravitate toward the ready-made black communities in America, especially New York City. Newly arriving Jamaicans brought with them the idea of the sound-system DJ; filtered through an African American perspective, the music moved in a different direction than it had in Jamaica. In many ways, hip-hop was born out of the Jamaican idea of turning record-playing into an art form.

From when I first met King Tubby and see him work, I knew there was a man with a great deal of potential. He could make music outta the mistakes people bring him, like every spoil is a style to King Tubby. He would drop out the bits where a man sing a wrong note and bring up another instrument or drop out everything for pure bass and drum riddim; then he’d bring back in the singing. You would never know there was a mistake there because he drop in and out of tracks like that’s what he was always intending to do. He do it all live, too. He don’t build it up bit by bit, him jus’ leggo the tape and do his thing. You watch him, it like watching a conductor or a maestro at work. And of course every time it would be different. He always want to surprise people—I think he even want to surprise himself sometimes—and if he mix the same tune a dozen times, you will have twelve different version.

In the early 1970s, many technologies became much more widely available to the general public, including the portable
PA system, the multichannel mixer, and the magnet-drive turntable made by the Technics company.